The leading edge of finance and technology. :
Popular myth holds that pirates of the 17th century would squirrel away bounty beneath the sands of the Caribbean, hiding treasure where no one else might find it. It was a primitive form of security: the less accessible, the better. A reincarnation of this semi-apocryphal practice has risen, strangely, to become the dominant method for securing virtual wealth in the cryptocurrency era. People use “cold storage,” meaning they stash their private keys—the password-like secrets that grant them ownership of Bitcoin and other blockchain-based assets—offline.